


a room no one can leave

by ryyves



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Ableist Language, Benten & dancing, Benten's death, Child Abuse, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Gen, Healing, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Juno's childhood, Past and Present, Physical Abuse, Suicidal Thoughts, whoops I'm projecting on Juno
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-17
Updated: 2020-09-17
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:22:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26503609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryyves/pseuds/ryyves
Summary: Benzaiten Steel is ten, and he doesn’t fall when he dances.
Relationships: Benzaiten Steel & Juno Steel, Benzaiten Steel & Sarah Steel, Juno Steel & Sarah Steel
Comments: 10
Kudos: 29





	a room no one can leave

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Nikolai Duffy's _The Little Shed of Various Lamps._
> 
> * * *
> 
> Had to write this real quick after finishing The Monster’s Reflection. I have feelings but my main feeling is Benten Was A Dancer!

Benzaiten Steel is ten, and he doesn’t fall when he dances. Not at practice, at least, and not at recitals. Only in front of Juno, in the living room, the closest thing to a studio space their mother will ever allow. Juno sits in a stiff-backed chair, the one he sits at for meals, and Benten uses it as a barre. He rests his hands on it while he flings his leg back, up, hold, count.

Benten counts under his breath. He does his routine while their mother is her office, no sound coming through the closed door. His hair falls in his face, just long enough to be a nuisance but not long enough to do anything about, and as Juno watches him from the chair, he pushes it aside between moves.

Their mother doesn’t go to Benten’s recitals, so Juno catches the bus with him and waits out in the lobby for hours while the dancers prepare. He does his schoolwork in the dim box office light the coach puts on out of pity. Their mother has told Benten, at least seventeen times—Juno counts; someone has to have a record of these things—that she won’t pay for his lessons, sometimes in a rage and sometimes with cold certainty. Thirteen of those times, after Benten’s eyes welled up the way he could never control, she apologized, deflated, promised him she would always support him.

And Benten believed her. Juno thinks Benten believed her.

Forget the exact words exchanged. Forget the fact that she’s turned to Juno, and here he has no numbers, and asked, _What did I say? Tell me, exactly, what I said, because I don’t remember saying anything like that to you._

Forget the pain that slices through Juno’s abdomen when he tries to remember the words. Suddenly, as he is thinking, everything she has ever said to them is insignificant, insufficient to leverage against her without bringing emotions in.

He sees it in his mother’s eyes, the knowledge that he has nothing on her, the quiet triumph. She doesn’t need to say a thing. Children should know their place. Well, he knows his fucking place.

The moment she looks away, he flees.

When Juno needs to hit something, he waits until he’s out of the house.

But Benten’s eyes are bright when he dances, a hundred miles away, lost in some starry future where he can practice in any studio he wants to for as long as he wants to, without looking over his shoulder every five minutes and without Juno looking for him.

Juno rests his chin on the chair back. Benten shifts his hand so it rests beside Juno’s cheek instead of underneath it.

There’s an elegance to Ben’s frame that Juno’s will never have, his musculature clear even through his long-sleeved shirt and trousers. It’s not ideal dancing attire, but their mother said she might take them out tonight, and they needed to be dressed properly. Practice today is a snatched half-hour while their mother is busy and quiet in her office.

Dancing alone in the living room, Benten touches a partner’s waist, takes them beneath the arms and holds them above him. He laughs, that winning smile with its soft dimples and scrunched-up eyes, and says, “This is the part where I get lifted, and you’d laugh if I tried to mime it.”

Juno says, “Me? Laugh?”

And Ben throws out his arm, but he’s laughing enough that he has to pause to catch his breath. This sort of banter is commonplace, a casual dismissal so easily laughed off. A fact of life, a way that people interact.

“Hey, come on, Benten,” says Juno. “You know I wouldn’t laugh at you.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Hey. Show me another one.”

So Benten does.

* * *

Benten has been talking about this dream, about growing up and making a name for himself, about seeing posters with his face in glitter and sequins beside his name in elegant scrawl. About prepping himself for opening night, an audience of hundreds, his body perfect to his standards above anyone else’s.

About teaching little kids to hold their positions and watching them grow.

When they are alone in their room, he tells Juno this. With the door closed, he can say anything he wants to. Juno keeps looking at the door, listening for sounds outside it – he knows the door will hold, but a knock means their mother was listening. If she hears, it will be that much easier for her to swallow Benten whole.

“Aren’t you worried?” says Juno.

“About what?”

Sometimes Juno wishes he had Benten’s airy calm, his dreamy confidence, his absolute conviction that the world is good. But someone has to look out for them all, and if that’s going to be Juno, he might as well get good at it.

He doesn’t know how to say what he wants to, and for a while, they stare into the dark. Streetlights and, overhead, glowing billboards and old restaurant OPEN signs in neon turn the night a pale grey. Juno can see the undecorated wall, his school bag and Benten’s and their clutter of belongings piled haphazardly.

Juno says, “About… you know.”

“I don’t. I’m telling you my dream and you’re being extremely cryptic about, I don’t know, your disapproval.”

Juno says, “You know that when you make it big, I’ll be there. No matter what. I’ll be there.”

“Then what is it?” There’s a soft fear, blink and you’d miss it, that slips into Ben’s voice.

“It’s…” Juno whispers. “You _know._ ”

He stretches out a hand and points to the wall, beyond which lies their mother’s room.

“She’s not going to get in my way, either,” says Benten.

“That’s not what I mean.”

Ben shifts, sitting up in bed, one leg extended. From the bottom bunk, Juno can see it, a dark shape in the night, shaking in front of him. In the whispered dark, his covers rustle as they fall to his waist. Juno and Ben have never been wanting of a place to sleep, even on those long months when food was scarce and the only end either of them could see was their mother saying, _We’ll get out of this. I’ll get you out of this. You don’t have to worry about anything, my little monsters._

Ben says, “Then what do you mean?”

Juno closes his eyes. More than anything, he wants to be older, old enough to take care of Benten on his own. They could strike out alone into the city, making their own way, not having to whisper around the monster in their house.

Every time he thinks he’s had enough, his mother drops another apology down his throat like honey after a pill. He is believing them less and less each time.

He isn’t sure when the last time he believed them was.

He says, at last, “I don’t want kids.”

“Okay,” says Ben. “That’s your choice.”

“You don’t understand. I don’t want kids because… I don’t want to fuck them up. I don’t want to bring someone into this world and then hurt them and give them a bunch of… shit and make them want to die and have them be afraid all the time.”

Language like that would get Juno reprimanded, at the least, so he says it softly, eyes fixed on the wall to their mother’s room. The night hums its neon song, the soft roar of their appliances. Juno can’t hear his brother’s breath.

Before Ben can speak, Juno continues. “I don’t want anything to do with kids. But you… You just know. It’s that easy. You just want to work with kids and it—”

“You want to die.”

“A hypothetical,” says Juno. “Yes. I don’t know.”

“I’m not afraid,” Benten confesses, and Juno doesn’t know what he’s confessing to: his fear of their mother, or his fear of being like their mother. “Because I know what not to do.”

“That’s enough for you, huh?”

“Yeah. That’s enough.”

Ben retracts his leg, and Juno can hear the sounds of him lying back in bed.

And there are so many follow-ups, so many questions Benzaiten could ask about Juno and the dark places inside him, but they grew up in the same dark place, hand in hand, so Benten leaves them unsaid.

But Juno keeps looking at the space where Benten’s leg was, where the dark fills in darker. He says, “Well, you’re going to do a great job, you know.”

“Aw,” says Benten, and he laughs so sharply, a hiccup in the night, that both of them still and stare at the door. They are too old to believe in monsters, but the woman who prowls the house is frightening enough to make up for them. “You believe in me.”

“I’m going to sleep,” Juno says at last. “Try not to get us killed by morning.”

The bed rustles and then, over his head, Juno can hear the soft sound of footsteps. Ben jumps the last couple of rungs to the floor, and the floor shudders.

“Hey, come on.” It’s that soft voice Ben uses when things are strained between them, that he defaults to when their mother is done screaming at them. He sits on Juno’s bed, ducking to fit, and Juno pulls his covers up higher. “Don’t be mad at me.”

“I’m not.”

“I’m not you, that’s all. I’ve thought about this, about the sort of person I want to be, for me and for other people, and, yeah, it’ll take work, but I don’t want to just shut myself off from everything I could do because I’m _afraid_.”

A dozen comebacks flit through Juno’s head— _It’s such a bad thing to be me, that’s right, I’m the family screwup, took you long enough to admit it_ —but he doesn’t say one. It’s dark and he’s tired and he doesn’t have anything to apologize for.

But that’s thinking he uses with his mother, and this is Ben. He says, “Pretty solid ten-year plan.”

“Yeah.” Ben laughs, and this time it’s so soft, just a warm breath in the air. “Don’t you trust me?”

“Of course I trust you.”

“Then it’ll be fine.”

* * *

_Juno thinks a lot about falling. Bodies of dance partners who tumbled to the mats during holiday recitals, the roaring voices of an old coach, of his mother, while Juno watched from the door. Bodies he’s seen crumpled in a hundred different ways and never stuck around to hear about the autopsies. The horror of it never goes away, the silky stillness, the blank eyes. The body, concave, in grotesque angles._

_He thinks about falling when he climbs highrise buildings to meet new clients, their wall-to-wall glass windows, the city dizzy and small enough to hold in a cup. If he can see out, he holds onto every wall and rolling chair he can. He knows it isn’t enough to catch him, but it quiets his heart._

_He thinks about falling, and he doesn’t think about his brother._

_The buildings are so high and Juno has done enough research, on and off, for cases taken and cases discarded, to know how high he needs to jump from. Hell, his own apartment complex would do the trick._

_It sits like fog in the back of his head and keeps him from reaching too deeply into his thoughts. Mostly he doesn’t to carry through. Mostly, he carries on as always._

_Because the thought of all that air kissing him like a hundred forgotten lovers before he went seems like the worst way to go. Hold him underwater; crush his trachea; put a gun to his temple and blast out his brains so he knows, finally, what it felt like._

_Maybe that’s what he’s waiting for. To pay the price himself, as though he still has to pay._

_Bodies on the studio floor of a small recital, their legs in feasible but uncomfortable angles, their hands, such long hands, the long slope of their arms, reaching up for the barre, scraping the mirror with long nails._

_Someone he knew, crying but still floating across the studio floor, crying the whole way home but not letting any of them say,_ Are you okay? _Someone he knew crying, crying after practice with his dance bag clutched to his chest, dressed in sweatpants and a jacket and his nice shoes replaced with scuffed-up trainers, a few sizes too small for him._

_Someone whose face is gone to Juno, because he’s seen that face age twenty-one years and he doesn’t have any pictures from before he turned twenty-five, and none of those worth saving. And it’s hard to remember._

* * *

Benten gives up on asking his mother to watch him dance and settles on dancing inconspicuously enough that she doesn’t force him to stop. It is the closest thing to a truce Juno has ever seen happen under this roof – his mother’s indifference, the heavy locked door of her office, Benten’s feet landing soft on the floor after a jump.

The home comms doesn’t always work and Juno has learned the hard way how angry his mother gets if she doesn’t have a way to contact Benten at practice, in case something should happen to him, Juno guesses, so Juno tells her he’ll make sure Ben gets back.

But, if he’s honest, he doesn’t always stay. Sometimes Ben is in there for four hours, and it gets dark all around them, and Juno finishes his schoolwork with minimal effort. Sometimes Juno has to get out.

Juno sits in the front row at recitals. He’s always the first person in the building, anyway. They don’t have the money and Juno can’t ask his mother, but Benten has a winning smile and a way with words, though he hates using them, and he is solely responsible for every performance Juno has ever seen.

Tonight they’re in a small venue, some building whose name Juno never bothered to memorize and certainly won’t remember now, so small that tickets were sold at the door. Still, you’d have to bring a comms to gain entry. There are seats on three walls and the mirror in the back covered by a black cloth. All the dancers wear plain, bright colors. All their features are drawn in sharp angles by the harsh lighting. The scratchy music comes in and fills the place like waves.

It’s not a full performance – it’s more a practice recital, a show between two larger shows, though Juno doesn’t know any of the right vocabulary and most of the watchers are family members. In ones and twos, the dancers, aged ten to fifteen, come out from the fire door and execute their pieces.

Benten comes out seventh out of eight. Juno blanks out for most of the show. Dancing is only interesting when Benten does it.

Ben wears a pale blue, while his partner, a tall, striking girl who scans the audience as if looking for flaws, wears a star-patterned navy.

Juno hardly knows anything about dance, because whenever Ben talks about it, Juno listens but doesn’t retain any information. But he knows this: the dance starts out slow and intense, like a story, and the dancers’ expressions are as vital to its telling as the lines of their arms. Juno focuses on Benten, his eyes lined with a pale, glittery blue and drawn into sharp focus, his elbows and wrists and ankles moving like a language Juno has no access to.

Juno knows this: it’s beautiful. And it makes his brother happy.

When Benten is lifted into the air, the thin veil of fabric draped from his waistband or his shoulders glittering around the tight bun of his dance partner, Juno gasps.

He has seen this before, not this move but a lift, Benten’s body a comma in the shitty lighting. He has been allowed to sit, upon occasion and providing he keeps quiet, in the corner of whichever practice room Ben is using then.

He has not seen it before two dozen held breaths, under a spotlight. Ben, in bliss, moving like it’s as natural as thinking.

In his partner’s arms, Ben is nothing more than a doll, beautiful and long-legged and fluid as he is thrown into the air.

And Benzaiten falls.

He gets up, of course. He locks eyes with his partner and they resume the routine exactly where they left off. Juno can’t make out a single discrepancy with the beat of the song.

But he fell.

Juno is prepared to wait for Benten in the lobby, on the street outside, for as long as he needs, but the door to the changing rooms swing open and Benten comes out with a dark expression, in his jacket and trainers. His bag swings against his hip, and he favors one leg.

“You were great,” says Juno.

Benten sighs. “Sure.”

“What went wrong?” says Juno. “I’ve never seen you fall—”

“In public.” Benten’s voice is tight with rage. It’s the sort of rage Juno rarely sees around that devil-may-care glee in pulling off some harebrained scheme to get someone to notice them, to give them something other than toys, to put them in their place.

Oh, they learned well.

No, Juno thinks. It’s more than that. It’s wanting to be something, do something, matter to somebody other than just the two of them in a way that playing by the rules will never get them.

“My form was off,” Ben is saying. “I wasn’t in control. For a second, I thought of—of someone else watching me—and I wasn’t in control. And it’s not just me, it’s them, it’s… I screwed up someone else’s recital.”

“Ben,” says Juno. It’s his turn to use that soft voice. He stops, there on the damp streets with their pockets of trash and puts his hand on his brother’s shoulder. “Hey. It’s okay. You’re okay, your partner’s okay, it’s okay.”

Benten speaks between clenched teeth, his voice so tight it’s a miracle Juno hears it at all. “But I wasn’t perfect. Damn it, Juno, I wasn’t perfect and I screwed up and I—you don’t understand, you don’t—I’m not good enough. If I can’t even pull that off, what good am I?”

“Looked pretty amazing to me,” Juno offers.

But Ben just looks more miserable.

“And, hey. You’re good enough to do better next time.”

Juno grins long enough that Benten has to smile back.

* * *

And it’s Juno’s fault. Juno stands in front of his mother with his chin raised and answers to her for the ice on his brother’s ankle, swelling even underneath the dirty kitchen towel.

His mother’s hair is loose around her chin, wisps of it sticking to her lips. She keeps reaching up to pull it out of her mouth.

Benten fell, and for that, his mother is raging through the kitchen, saying, “I can’t in good conscience let you go back and hurt yourself again.” It sounds so harmless, the sort of thing he’s heard on the schoolyard after school but hasn’t heard from the mouths of any of his friends’ mothers, the sort of subtle twist that fills him with dread.

Benten says, in a voice that sends pangs to Juno’s clenched fists, “I won’t. I promise, Ma. It was a mistake, a slip—”

“A slip? I don’t know which of you to ground first.”

“It was my fault,” says Juno. The murder in his mother’s eyes makes him sure he chose right. He doesn’t want to see that expression directed toward his brother for a second longer.

“Both of you, then. You told me it was safe.”

No one ever told her that, but neither of them will say that aloud.

But she continues. “You told me you’d _be_ safe.”

“I was,” says Benten. “It’s only a sprain. I’ll be fine.”

The kitchen is small around them, its single bulb flickering, Benten’s leg propped up on the counter. Juno keeps himself between his mother and Benten, but his mother keeps looking over his shoulder and Juno isn’t tall enough to keep her out.

As though Juno isn’t there at all, Ma says, “I don’t want you going back there tomorrow, or any day after that.”

Benten’s eyes go wide, just for a second, just enough for Juno to know that it lands like any blow.

“Do you understand me?” says their mother.

Benten closes his eyes, his lashes dark and damp, and nods. He nods, and he doesn’t have to say a word. Juno watches the fight leave him, and when the fight flares in Juno, when his fist crashes into the small kitchen table, leaving it shuddering, his mother balls her hand in his shirt and yanks him away. The collar presses against his throat and he gags, but he doesn’t fall.

And just like that, the pressure is gone. All Juno can see of his mother is her receding back, her bedroom door slammed behind her.

The kitchen table is still and undamaged. There is no leftover mess for Juno to shoulder.

Rubbing his neck, Juno goes over to his brother, but he doesn’t touch.

“Come on,” he says. “Let’s get out of here.”

Benten nods, but he glances behind Juno before he wipes his eyes.

* * *

And later, much later, when Juno is reading in his bottom bunk and Benten is swinging his legs off the side, barely missing Juno’s head, a knock comes at the door.

“Boys?” says their mother’s quiet voice. She’s one word in and Juno can hear the apology on her tongue, the manufactured regret he isn’t old enough, yet, to hurl back at her. “Can I open the door?”

Juno can’t see Benten, can’t tell him in a single glance to say, _No._

Benten says, “Sure.”

The door opens and their mother stands there in her pajamas. The light pours in around her so she looks like a shadow, her hair pulled back and the lines of her face deep and drawn. She says, “Come on, get off that bed and talk to me. Really talk to me.”

So Benten slides down the ladder and stands between Juno and the door. He has it perfectly measured; Juno would have to shift up on his pillow if he wanted to see his mother, but he doesn’t. He looks at his brother’s back, at the creases of his t-shirt and the hair stuck to the back of his neck, and his hands, tensed in odd angles at his sides.

“You know I didn’t mean that, right, baby?” says Sarah Steel. There’s something in her voice, but Juno doesn’t believe even half of it is sincere. “Of course I know how much you love dancing. Of course I want you to be happy.”

“I know,” says Benten. Without being able to see his face, Juno has to deduce from voice alone the things Benten is really saying, the things he is hiding. What he is saying is, _I’m tired. We’ve been down this river a thousand times and you’ve never cared if I was happy, you don’t care as long as you felt good about how good a parent you were._

Or maybe that’s just Juno’s head talking.

Benten is tall enough that, when their mother enters the room, she doesn’t bend down the way she did when they were younger. She says, “You know I can’t bear to see you hurt, don’t you?”

“Yeah, Ma.”

She ruffles his hair. He stands, swaying, and takes it. “That’s my little monster. I’ll even come to your next show. Just you wait.”

And Benten stands in the middle of the room when their mother closes the door behind her, shutting out the onslaught of light. As Juno’s eyes readjust to the dimness, he sees the shape of his brother, staring at him, his lips pressed tight together. Juno knows well how to read the hurt in that face, but what he sees now is hope. Juno sees a conversation lush with promise in Benten’s eyes. It’s so out of place it makes Juno dizzy.

For a few moments, Juno listens to their breaths in the small room and does nothing.

Finally, with a laugh he doesn’t mean to give, he says, “You don’t really believe that. You know she’ll forget about you in the morning.” About all of this, except the part where Benten said, _Ma._

Benten sighs. “She’s trying her best. She’d never really force me to stop.”

“You don’t know that,” says Juno.

“Look,” says Benten, his voice finally snapping. “She came around. Doesn’t that count for anything?”

Juno turns away and closes his eyes. Nothing shifts in the room, which means his brother is not moving. Someone has to talk first. Juno holds his breath and lets the silence spread out.

“I’m not stupid, Juno,” says Ben in a heavy voice. “I know every trick as well as you do. But I’m not going to make myself cold just because the world wants me that way.”

“Tell me how that goes,” says Juno.

* * *

_There are so many places in this city Benzaiten Steel never saw. There are dancefloors in ballrooms with dainty bars, pink drinks in glasses with stems and people in tailored florals; there are hangars and subway tunnels that open up in the richest neighborhoods and a view from beyond the dome—beyond the dome—but Juno has learned to keep his small pleasures to himself._

_Juno would show Benten these places, all of them, would take him across the city, saying,_ Look, there was so much more, just like you told me. _He would say,_ I believe you now, _like it’s not too late. Like somehow he can make up for two decades by living in every crack and crevice he can find. By climbing to every bright place and basking._

_And, yes, he basks. He lets the light fall on him even though he doesn’t deserve it. He lives for the city when he can’t live for himself._

_But there are too many places in the city Juno wants nothing to do with, named haunts and unnamed hideaways, places that know Sarah Steel’s name or just Juno’s. There are too many places he has to go no matter how much he wants to. The city belongs to whoever can pay Juno the most, but it’s Juno’s city. Even with the house on fire, he still wants to get inside._

_It is precious as a family heirloom, precious as a boy with his face exchanging answers on take-home quizzes in the kitchen with Juno, laughing and jostling his shoulder._

_How many murders has Juno solved? How many corpses has he studied before their autopsies? The city is full of ghosts._

_No. The city is its own ghost. A receptacle for the dead._

_But there’s her voice. Every time Juno missteps, he chides himself in her voice. The consonants that circle his head fall off her teeth. No matter where he goes in the city, to the highest skyscrapers and the deepest sewers, her voice follows. It slides through his bones and leaves him chilled from the inside._

_If only he could rip off his skin and take it out, exorcise it once and for all, crush it under his feet, he would be free._

_He has her eyes when he pulls the safety on his handgun. He has her hand when he studies the scars on his arms and shoulders in the mirror, shirtless after waking, sweat-covered, from a dream that doesn’t leave him all day._

_And, yes, he thinks of doing it the right way, the way it happens in Juno’s family. Click, bang. It’s simple and easy and there’s nothing stopping him._

_Through it all, the wound of his grief festers unbandaged, and every precipice Juno teeters on risks tearing it before it scars. Every Peter Nureyev to tell him his history is in every public database in the whole damn galaxy; every Ramses O’Flaherty to see through him to the one thing keeping him standing; every Rita with her unassuming voice and quick wit, never asking a word; they all threaten to shake apart the rickety scaffolding Juno calls his life._

_So how would you say it? How would you sing sweet your grief? How would you give a name to something that’s taken yours? No matter what, Juno Steel has Steel at the end of it, and that means everything._

* * *

Every patch of trouble they fall into should rest on Juno’s shoulders alone. Juno makes sure to hit harder and faster than Benten. He wants his shiner to be the one their classmates stare at, his bloody knuckles. He wants to carve a doorway in whatever wall they’re up against and make sure Benten gets out.

Their mother comes to the meetings with every principal in every school Juno stayed in because his mother knew how to change her voice to get what she wanted. It’s the hassle, though; he knows that even now, that if she didn’t have to deal with people and meetings and paperwork and digging up Juno’s IDs, he’d have been out on the streets half a dozen times over.

She says, “I’m doing this because I’m a good person. I’m being kind to you. Don’t make me regret it. It won’t be this easy next time.”

So Juno vows that if he’s ever going to be a good person, he’s never going to say it aloud. The saying aloud is what makes it a lie. The being good because other people will look at you and smile.

Well, who needs a mother, anyway? Juno can take care of himself, and he can take care of his brother.

He tells himself that, and he suffers any consequences that come his way.

* * *

_He keeps having these dreams where he wakes up falling. Toward his ceiling, sometimes, his windows, toward the blue plasma sky. He is slipping off every precipice he comes to, scrabbling with everything in him, tumbling toward or away from the city._

_He keeps having dreams where the boy is holding him by the wrist while the blood comes out. In his dream, he is sick with it, there in the bedroom. He can see the burnt flesh, the red stain that drips down and down, clotted and thick. It shouldn’t look like that, he thinks, desperately, trying to yank himself out of the dream, but that only makes it pour out quicker._

_The boy in the dream says,_ It should have been you. _Or maybe it’s,_ It could have been. _Benten waiting all these years to tell Juno the truth, in his own voice, which is, in the dream, just the memory of a voice._

_Juno is pulling his hands back from the boy who doesn’t look like any boy Juno has ever seen, his eyes and his teeth, but Juno knows him._

_Juno has the gun in his hand. He is getting his fingerprints all over it. He can feel the sweat on his hand, but he knows how to hold a gun. It never slips._

_He aims with the Theia while the boy’s hand slips off his wrist. He pulls the trigger in a dozen directions, and the entry holes form a silhouette in the wall, holding nothing but hair._

_Juno never quite gets away._

_He wakes unrested, shivering. He pulls on his heaviest coat just to go into the kitchen to start the coffee maker._

_Before he’s been awake fifteen minutes, he’s downed two mugs of coffee, but he’s still shivering._

_“Get it together,” he tells himself in the three-a.m. dark. His voice is sleep-gruff, and he can’t convince himself to listen._

_He is thirty-eight years old and he has his own life to live. His boots are heavy and he doesn’t know how to fly, not yet, not like the boy he watched flapping his wings across a hardwood floor, checking his form in the mirror, his hair clipped back, grinning._

_Or this: Juno Steel is thirty-eight years old and he still doesn’t know how to live._

* * *

And Juno doesn’t know when Benten Steel falls for the last time. He doesn’t know how his arms felt, falling, because Juno Steel was carving a life for himself out of the plasma domes over Hyperion City, and that life didn’t have his brother in it and the rest of it was fog.

All he knows is that Benzaiten didn’t get back up.

He didn’t go down with bloody feet, adrenaline in his blood, his face split like a wound with joy, the way he’d probably hoped he would.

And he still trusted his mother. To the broken end, he trusted her.

Benten was just a kid, invincible, head full of hurt but no thought of dying. Not him dying, and not his city, his home, the childhood he was breaking his fingers to hold onto. He was a little terror by anyone’s logic, one half of the wildcard that was Juno-and-Benten Steel.

He was just a kid, but his face didn’t look like a kid’s. It had all the pieces of a face but it didn’t look like one. And the blood, how it spread across his shirt, across the wall and the floor and every belonging Benten had ever touched and would need packing away, soon, by someone who wasn’t Juno. The room dripped with it; it gagged.

And Juno, holding his brother’s body like if he held him hard enough, he could follow him. Juno’s voice a blur as he turned to his mother. He shut her out of his grief, out of any grief. Juno wasn’t Juno, wasn’t anything but white, white space in his chest and the space behind his eyes.

Juno left that room shattered.

Juno never left that room.

* * *

_There is a room no one can walk out of and Juno is pacing its floors and running his hands over its walls. He is not sleeping, or not sleeping well. He is staying buzzed on coffee and energy tablets so he doesn’t have to face the boy in his dreams, the crater of his chest without breath to hold it up, eyes blank as a daytime sky. While the shape of the boy fails him, Juno learns the shape of the room._

_Juno is opening and closing all the windows. He lets the city in and chases it out. In the multicolored dark, he sits on his bed and reads through old cases and law books, dense things that keep his interest far longer than any television episode or newscaster’s drone. The harsh light of his screen makes his eyes sting, but if he stopped, he’d have to get out, and he doesn’t want to see his city. He doesn’t want his city to see him._

_Still, before his alarm goes off, Juno gets up. The longer he stays in bed, trapped in his apartment, the more miserable he is. It feels like emerging from bathwater, heavy and suffocating, and it slides down through him. The window is still dark, the night lit by neon more than the faintest trace of the sun._

_Juno collects his empty mugs and puts them in the sink without washing them. He changes into work clothes – not nice clothes, but distinctive enough to leave an impression of mystique and aloofness. He takes inventory of his own bedroom and his living room, searching for anything out of place. And, of course, everything is out of place, because Juno Steel shouldn’t be here, living his life like he has anything to live for._

_Mostly he lives on reflex. On instinct. Dig up a ration bar when you’re hungry. Take a hot shower when you’re cold. Let Rita talk your ear off while you pretend to listen._

_He lays out tasks in his head and carries them out, one by one. He dresses, ties his shoes, drains the dregs from the coffee pot. Locks his door behind him and checks it._

_It’s not bad, this little life Juno has built for himself. It’s not the life he wanted, not the life he would choose if given the chance, but it’s his._

_He steps out of his building onto the pre-dawn street, empty and black, and the cold air fills him. Overhead, the buildings rise to the dome, unreadable stone and glass. He tugs on the sleeves of his sweater._

_For a second, he can see the city from above, glittering in the night, not a neon monster so much a labyrinth, dizzy and hungry and comfortable. He swoops down the side of the building, hovers over the street, and slides into his body, shuddering with the contact. He sees the street clearly, the lit windows shining beside him, the people in their jackets and scarves not seeing him at all._

_For a second, he feels like flying._

_And the city, looming in its disgruntled beauty around him, the city that carries his mother’s name in every crevasse and dark alley and grand, glistening skyline, the city that puts his mother’s name around his throat like a hand and clenches, gives Juno its hand. It says,_ Live for me.


End file.
